A typical roll is a sequence of spells, each usually headed by a rubric naming its purpose and accompanied by a vignette, a coloured illustration that is often the first thing a modern reader notices and was sometimes the only part a cheap copy could afford. The spells are not narrative and are not doctrine. They are operative texts: things the dead person says, or has said on his behalf, to achieve a specific result.
Three are close to universal. Spell 125 covers the judgement in the Hall of the Two Truths, where the heart is weighed and the deceased recites the negative confession, a list of offences he declares he has not committed. It is the single most reproduced passage in Egyptian religious writing, and its vignette of scales, Anubis, Thoth and the waiting Ammit has become the visual shorthand for Egyptian belief generally.
Spell 30B is inscribed on the heart scarab, a stone amulet laid on the chest, and asks the heart not to testify against its owner at exactly that weighing, an unusually candid admission that the Egyptians expected their own hearts to know things the confession denied. Spell 6 is written on the shabti, the small mummiform figure that agrees to answer the summons and do the dead man's compulsory labour in the next world; wealthy burials contain hundreds of them.
Beyond these the range is wide: spells for not dying a second time, for not walking upside down, for keeping the head attached, for turning into a falcon or a lotus, for breathing air and drinking water, for passing gates guarded by named demons whose names must be known and spoken. The long spell 17, a dialogue with commentary embedded in it, is the closest the corpus comes to theology.